It's time to ram home the anti-whaling message

The flagship of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Farley Mowat, has reached the point of no return in the Southern Ocean and does not have enough fuel to reach the closest port. Perhaps it is better to lose a ship in defence of the whales than it is to lose it to the bureaucrats. Perhaps it is time for a dramatic showdown after 20 years of illegal whaling activity in the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary.

The outlaw whalers have since 1986 illegally, ruthlessly and mercilessly murdered more than 18,000 intelligent, gentle, socially complex, sentient creatures we call whales. They are in the process of killing more than 1,000, including the endangered fins.

The politicians who purport to side with the whales just attend meetings and draft laws that are never enforced. They sit behind desks and pass judgment on activists while pretending to be concerned for the issue.

Activists toss a couple of stinkbombs on a deck that is running red with the hot blood of whales and they are accused of being extremists. It is incredible that attempts to stop the illegal slaughter of endangered whales are always called "extreme" yet the criminal slaughter of endangered whales in a whale sanctuary in defiance of a global ban on whaling is not considered extremist.

Do whale defenders have to die down here for the world to notice and take action against the criminal activities of the Japanese whalers?

For this reason, it has been decided to stop the operations of the Japanese floating slaughterhouse, Nisshin Maru, by ramming one of the ships up the slipway of that foul, sadistic piece of killing machinery.

Better to sacrifice a ship and make a difference than to lose the ship to the trickery of the bureaucrats. Whalers have been rammed before and whale defenders on the Sea Shepherd ships are in fact the most experienced ship rammers in the world, so they are confident they can ram the Nisshin Maru in such a way as to stop its illegal activities without hurting any of its crew. A large chuck of metal jammed up its rear end will stop any further processing of whales and force a return to port.

Perhaps it is time to be the extremists that the critics are always accusing us of being. Perhaps it's time to give these cruel whalers a steel enema they will never forget.

· Captain Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, wrote this last week. He has since agreed not to ram his flagship, Farley Mowat, into the Japanese whaling fleet's mother ship